Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (32 page)

Back in 1798, this English admiral had led resistance against Napoleon’s siege at the crusader castle of Acre. “That demon Sidney Smith has made Dame Fortune jilt me!” Napoleon had said afterward. Smith had, in fact, a whole range of stories about Napoleon, or the time he escaped from a French prison, or the time, in 1807, when Smith ferried the Portuguese royal family to safety in Brazil. Many enjoyed his colorful stories, though some listeners proved less than patient when the admiral, not known for his succinct qualities, insisted on telling every detail.

Vienna society was inclined to indulge Smith, whose idiosyncrasies, for many, only added to his appeal. Crowds crammed into his apartment for his Wednesday-night salons, spilling over into the hallways and staircases. Smith would often appear there, or at a ball, wearing not one honorary order at a time, but proudly displaying his whole collection, sometimes strung together onto his white silk sash. Alternatively, Smith would select one order, wear it for a while, and then change later in the evening, shuffling through his collection of stars, crosses, and insignia, “so as not to insult any guest” or award he had received.

To raise awareness and drum up support for freeing slaves in North Africa, Smith was organizing a series of events, and one of the first was a remarkable banquet scheduled for December 29, 1814. It was a gigantic picnic—a “humanitarian feast”—that would occur in the palace in the Augarten. Guests would pay 3 ducats for the banquet, and an additional 10 guldens for the palace ball afterward, with all proceeds going toward ransoming slaves.

No fewer than 150 kings, princes, generals, diplomats, and other celebrities had accepted his invitation, including the Russian tsar, the Prussian king, and many other leading figures at the congress. They were certainly attracted to the cause. Part of the curiosity, too, it was said, was the experience of paying for a meal themselves, “a novelty of such great charm that not one of the crowned heads…would miss it.”

Seated around a long table in the form of a horseshoe, the guests enjoyed some of the finest delicacies of the Austrian empire. The food had been catered by Vienna restaurant owner Herr Jann, and some of the best wine from the Rhineland, Italy, and Hungary circulated liberally. The walls of the palace were covered with flags of the assembled states, and two orchestras entertained with national anthems. Royal entrances were further celebrated with a trumpet fanfare, the heralds blowing their horns on horseback and showing the admiral’s flair for drama. As La Garde-Chambonas said with admiration, it seemed like something from “the theater of Shakespeare.”

The only uncomfortable moment was when Herr Jann’s waiter, carrying a silver plate with a bill on top, approached the king of Bavaria, Maximilian I Joseph. The king, well known for his generosity, reached down into his waistcoat pocket to pay the donation. When he came up empty-handed, he shifted his weight and fumbled around in other pockets, soon realizing that he did not, in fact, have any money on him.

With the waiter still standing over his shoulder, “impatiently jingling his money against the dish,” the king glanced at one of his courtiers, Count Charles Rechberg, down the table, hoping that he would come to the rescue. Rechberg, however, was deep in discussion with Wilhelm von Humboldt about a new book: his own, two-volume
Les peuples de la Russie.
Another nervous glance down the table, but Rechberg was still oblivious. The king’s “torture reached a point where,” as Count La Garde-Chambonas jokingly put it, “he would have liked to shout, Three ducats! Three ducats! A kingdom for three ducats!”

The farce ended when the Russian tsar came to the rescue and paid the king’s fee. The waiter was “a better bill collector than a courtier,” someone observed, and the whole table roared with laughter—the king of Bavaria, afterward, the loudest of all. Admiral Smith also had good reason to be happy. His philanthropic feast had netted several thousand for the cause of fighting slavery.

Chapter 20

K
ING OF THE
S
UBURBS

Too frightened to fight each other, too stupid to agree.

—T
ALLEYRAND ON THE
G
REAT
P
OWERS AT THE
C
ONGRESS OF
V
IENNA

W
ith only a few days left in the year, the congress continued to take one step forward, two back, as Cardinal Consalvi noted. The delegates had reached a stalemate over Saxony. While Talleyrand advocated law and justice, Metternich was trying to solve the dispute by striking a bargain.

After the last outburst, when Hardenberg stormed over to the tsar with a portfolio of confidential letters, the Austrian foreign minister had not given up on finding another way whereby Prussia could reach its promised population of 10 million without having to commit the crime of seizing the whole of Saxony. There were, in fact, many possibilities, and Metternich hoped that Prussia would be intrigued enough at least to consider them.

Of these options, the plan that Metternich preferred would offer territory along the Rhine to return Prussia to its promised population size of 10 million “souls”—this was the word for population, the yardstick measure adopted by the congress in carving up the map. Metternich also threw in another five hundred thousand souls to sweeten the deal. This was an interesting proposal, Prussia admitted, but some of the population figures for the territories on the list seemed rather inflated, and given Metternich’s track record, Prussia was not inclined to take him at his word.

For weeks, diplomats had pored over numbers, and, typically, they ended up rejecting the statistics claimed by the other side. Accuracy was not easy, even with the best of intentions, given all the loss of life and the vast movements of peoples in the war. For this reason, Metternich proposed another way to resolve the conflict: Why not create an Evaluations Committee to look more closely into the population figures in all the territories, and help obtain the best estimates possible?

Castlereagh also liked the idea of the committee, and he came over to Kaunitz Palace in late December to introduce the issue with Talleyrand. The French minister’s support was crucial. Even if he was still outside the inner circle, Talleyrand enjoyed rising popularity for his defense of Saxony and commanded a veritable legion of admiring smaller states that looked to him for leadership. Fortunately, Castlereagh found, Talleyrand did not oppose the idea outright. On the contrary, he liked it, provided, of course, that the committee did not lose sight of the importance of principles in the labyrinth of numbers.

Talleyrand suggested that this new committee should begin, first of all, by recognizing the rights of the king of Saxony. The committee should also consider other factors in evaluating a territory than a simple head count. Peasants “without capital, land or industry,” he said, ought not to be counted the same as the prosperous inhabitants of the Rhine, or some other relatively affluent part of Germany. Next, Talleyrand went further and proposed that he, Castlereagh, and Metternich make an agreement to support Saxony.

“An agreement?” Castlereagh asked, taken somewhat aback. “It is, then, an alliance that you are proposing?”

“This agreement can very well be made without an alliance; but it shall be an alliance if you wish,” Talleyrand answered. “For my part, I have no objection.”

“But an alliance supposes war, or may lead to it, and we ought to do everything to avoid war,” Castlereagh said, mindful of his recent orders from London.

“I agree with you,” Talleyrand replied. “We ought to do everything, except to sacrifice honor, justice, and the future of Europe.”

“War would be regarded with disfavor among us,” Castlereagh replied.

“War would be popular with you if it had a great object—one truly European.”

Remarkably, when Talleyrand mentioned this idea of a possible British-French-Austrian alliance, Castlereagh, to his pleasure, had not refused outright. He had not even seemed startled. In fact, given his own frustrations with the deadlock, Castlereagh had also been considering the possibilities of working in closer collaboration with France.

The next day, Talleyrand was updated on the proposed Evaluations Committee. There was good news and bad news. The good news was that the idea of establishing it had been accepted; the bad news was that the committee had already been appointed and France had not been invited to participate.

Correctly predicting that this information would provoke an unpleasant scene, Castlereagh had not wanted to convey this message himself. Instead, he sent over his brother, Lord Stewart, who, though not exactly known for his tact or finesse, made a gallant effort to break the news gently.

When Talleyrand learned that the French had been blackballed, he demanded to know who opposed his membership.

“It is not my brother,” Stewart replied.

“Who is it, then?”

Hesitating, Stewart started, “Well—it is.” He paused before the words escaped his mouth: “the Allies.”

At this point, Talleyrand lost his patience. Since the Big Four were still acting as if they were at war against France, he would just let them sort out the congress themselves. He had had enough.

“Europe shall learn what has occurred,” Talleyrand threatened. He would make sure that everyone learned how Castlereagh had abandoned Saxony and Poland, and then “rejected the aid by which he might have saved them.” All this was highly sensitive, given the recent criticism Castlereagh had received back home.

The conversation ended abruptly, and Stewart rushed back to the British embassy to inform his brother.

Talleyrand’s outburst—threatening to call for his horses then and there and leave Vienna immediately, as one English embassy official described it—had made an impression. When the Evaluations Committee met a second time, in late December 1814, Talleyrand’s colleague, the Duke of Dalberg, sat comfortably at the table as France’s representative.

W
HILE THE FOREIGN
ministers disputed the number of people in a given province, the Great Powers decided to arrange one last set of meetings to resolve the Saxon crisis peacefully. This problem had, as Gentz put it, “eclipsed” all the others in importance. It was urgent to move quickly before either Prussia consolidated its hold over the seized territory or the congress ended in a fruitless stalemate.

During the meeting on December 30, the Russians proposed, yet again, that all of Saxony would go to Prussia. The tsar, by way of compromise, promised to free the king of Saxony and transfer him to a newly carved-out territory on the left bank of the Rhine. The Saxon king on the Rhine, with a proposed new capital of Bonn, would also receive Luxembourg, and many towns of the former archbishopric of Trier, including Cologne.

Austria was not pleased with these terms. The plan still involved destroying Saxony, handing over the entire territory to Prussia, and leaving its own realm exposed. As for the proposal about the Rhine, was it really a good idea to spirit away a legitimate king and set him up elsewhere in some newfangled kingdom? Why not wait and see what the newly appointed Evaluations Committee could find?

Three full months into the congress, the peacemakers were as divided as ever, and, in fact, they were still lining up in their original constellations. Russia and Prussia stood on one side, and Austria and Britain on the other.

Now, after hearing the Russian proposal, Britain and Austria countered with one of their own. As Saxony was a matter of European concern, why not ask other powers for their opinion? Why not, for that matter, consult the king of Saxony?

At this point, Hardenberg exclaimed that he would rather end the entire Congress of Vienna than allow such a scene to transpire. And should Prussia’s temporary occupation be made permanent, then the Prussians would, he added, consider any further opposition as “tantamount to a declaration of war!”

Castlereagh was losing his patience. Such a threat might intimidate “a Power trembling for its existence,” he replied, but it would have the opposite effect on a country that valued its dignity, like Great Britain. If that was the way Prussia wanted to conduct business, it might as well “break off the Congress” right now. The tension in the room, Gentz said, felt like “an enormous weight suspended over our heads.” The last meeting of 1814 had ended in chaos.